Behind the scenes of the Soulash Kickstarter

Greetings fellow gods,

Almost a week has passed since our failed Soulash Kickstarter. I was able to take a little bit of rest before going back into the grind, and I've decided to share some details about what I've done before and during the campaign. I'll show you some analytics stats explaining how my actions impacted the outcome, as it may be helpful to fellow game developers thinking of running their own crowdfunding campaign.

What is Soulash

Let's start with a short introduction, as it may be necessary to give a little context. Soulash is a traditional, turn-based roguelike game created by a single person for the past 4 years. The game has ASCII graphics, enhanced with animations and 3d effects, and modern graphics GUI. The combination is unusual, and for some, offputting, but many players also praised this decision as solid GUI makes it easy to get into the game. Soulash features an open world, destructible terrain, dynamic weather and is very combat-focused.

Soulash ASCII Alpha trailer

Kickstarter Pixelart trailer 

We're talking here about a game of a very niche genre, with some controversial decisions (the world is more static than procedurally generated). There are already similar big titles that passionate game devs created over many years or decades, and some of them free. It resulted in very high expectations for the game, but it also meant many people saw a high potential in Soulash.

Why Kickstarter

Soulash has been in an open alpha for the past 2 years, and since then, it grew significantly with new mechanics and content. Thanks to constant player feedback, I've worked hard on improving many elements of the game, which are not as fun to create, like GUI, overall user experience, modding tools to allow players to add their content easily, and much more. The only way I can work on Soulash is to spend my free time, as I have a family, and I work full-time to support it. My family has grown with the addition of my little girl last year, and development got even more difficult. This difficulty keeps growing and at some point, I will have to try to make a living out of making games or abandon this dream, as it long passed the stage of a simple hobby. I don't have an answer as to how to achieve one or the other yet, but the Kickstarter stretch goals were my first, shy attempt at trying to see if full-time indie dev can be a valid option.

Going back to the game. One of the most critical pieces of feedback I've heard over the years is the ASCII graphic presentation form. Many players seem to enjoy these visuals, including me, but for a significant portion of the potential player base, having or not having a tileset is a dealbreaker. That's why I've employed an artist - Xiclu, to design and create a pixel art demo of the game before we get Soulash on Steam. The main goal of the Kickstarter campaign was to secure funds to complete this graphics mod for the whole game, not just the demo.

The secondary goal was a complete long shot that I already mentioned, to try covering the cost of living for a year to focus fully on Steam release.

And the third goal that didn't require me to do anything special - was to get more people to know about Soulash. At least that one turned out quite successful.

Before Kickstarter

Initially, we planned to prepare the demo in 2 months and start the campaign in the 3rd month of our contract with Xiclu. It turned out to be too optimistic, and it took us one more month. We didn't give ourselves enough time to prepare appropriately, and I've decided to run the campaign for only three weeks to finish before the end of the month.

We've set up our Kickstarter preview page just a couple of days before the start, resulting in about 40 people who clicked "notify me". Not much, but since there are limited options we had at our disposal to market the game, we didn't want to spend them on notify me button.

We've set up a new Twitter account for Soulash to share between the two of us, as up until the campaign, I've promoted the game only through mine.

I wrote a post on Itch.io and IndieDB about the campaign starting soon. I've emailed all of the people who purchased the alpha version already on Itch, which was about 500 people.

We've prepared a Steam page presenting the new graphics demo, but we've dropped the demo only on Itch.io at first due to lack of time on my part. I was able to put the demo on Steam sometime in the middle of the campaign - it takes some time for the review process for the Steam page and the demo separately. We barely made the Steam page approved just a couple of hours before the start of the campaign. Pretty lucky there.

The first 48 hours

Ah, the critical first 48 hours, where Kickstarter actively helps your campaign. Our highest influx of people, about 1600 over 2 days, resulted in 75 backers and 12% of our funding goal of 10k EUR. At this time, we concentrated on posting to Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.

As you can see, Reddit was the most successful during that time, as many people were interested and spent the most amount of time going through the campaign page. Probably due to /r/roguelikes post. Twitter had also solid results there, but Facebook other than some traffic, most people were not interested at all, which can be seen by the time spent on the page. I don't have enough info on Facebook to go into details there, as I left it to Xiclu because I don't have a Facebook account. We tried different groups related to indie gaming there.

Other than social media, I posted on some websites, like:

forum.gamedev.pl 

indiedb 

Added the demo release to roguebasin and updated the Soulash page there.

Not much came out of it, but one of our most passionate community members - vitokin,  posted on gog.com, which turned out to be a decent choice to reach a couple of interested people that like indie games, not necessarily roguelikes.

First week

The results of the first 48 hours were not significant. We only reached 12% after Kickstarter helped us drive traffic. At that time, we went on Reddit where we could, and we exhausted our options there, but Twitter was much better for constant shouting into the ether about what's happening with the campaign. Our strategy shifted at this moment to try contacting different content creators - YouTubers and gaming websites.

We managed to get on a couple of websites like rpgwatch.com, polskigamdev.pl, and rpgcodex.net. The most traffic came from the Soulash itch page.

Two important things happened there that helped us get momentum. First was the Nookrium video showing the graphics demo.

We did get a significant bump on Itch. 

All those new people were already interested in the game due to the video, which helped a lot.

The second was Talamann Kickstarter stream. Don't miss this one due to the small number of views. It was a significant moment for the campaign that helped us get to 33% due to a couple of generous contributions.

As you can see these two videos, got us the highest traffic compared to other social media. Reddit was doing ok for the whole first week.

The second week

By the beginning of the second week, I've sent about 50 different emails. A few resulted in something, and it helped a little. I wrote personalized emails instead of copy-paste the same generic stuff, but it didn't help and turned out to be a waste of time. Either almost everyone was not interested, or nobody reads emails anymore.

You can see more people keep coming over the second week from YouTube videos and Twitter, but Reddit died down and dropped below Linkedin. Linkedin on its own is an interesting case, as I've posted only one message there, in polish, to all my work-related contacts. Quite a few people decided to help me out and contribute, even if they weren't into these types of games. The post was viewed almost 3000 times in the end, which is pretty significant even if it's not the target audience.

As for my other efforts, posts on Itch and Steam gathered some traffic. Probably demo on Steam helped here as well. Every other non-social-media source was barely any help. Aside maybe from roguebasin as well, as exactly the people who like these kinds of games come there. Albeit not many.

During the second week, we've made our very first dev poll to reorganize the stretch goals as it was clear that the ones players wanted were out of reach. I was only willing to commit to a 2-year plan. Initially, I've prepared the stretch goals so that I had enough funds to focus on the game at least until the Steam release. With lower funds, we could accomplish less but still offer two features that players wanted. The poll drove many people to our discord to participate, ask questions, talk about the game, or something else. That choice to remake the stretch goals this way turned out very positive for the community, and the results were different than I expected.

The final week was very, very slow up until the last 48 hours. The average daily increase was between 0.3 - 1% towards our goal.

The last 72 hours

By this time, everything looked pretty grim already. In the final 72 hours, we were missing 33% of our main goal. There was still a little bit of hope. Some campaigns had significant spikes in this time that helped them get far, but most of them got already funded before that time. No surprise happened, and we didn't have any significant ideas about what to do to push it further. Kickstarter was helpful again and drove some traffic to the page, but far from the numbers of the initial 48 hours. The campaign ended with 24% to go, and we got only 9% during the final 3 days.

We made a final round of Reddit and Facebook posts, at least where we could, but as you can see barely anything happened in the final week. Twitter brought great results throughout the full length of the campaign. Definitely from all of the social media, Twitter was the way to go for us. The YouTube activity came partly from new videos made by Blind.

From the different websites and forums, not much left than Itch and Steam activity. Not sure what were those google emails, but clearly nobody was interested anyway.

And that was it. Well, kind of. There is one more significant piece of data missing in the tables you've seen so far.

This is the traffic for the whole duration of the campaign. 2847 users came to the page directly, 1377 from social media, and 538 from referral pages. 129 from organic searches, but there's nothing there that would indicate it's something more than people writing "soulash" specifically looking for the link. The paid search can be ignored, it was a small experiment in google ads just to see if it can generate any results, and it only generated useless clicks with 0 seconds spent on the page.

The direct traffic is difficult to put. These are all of the links sent through emails, all of the links shared on different discords, or between different players directly. This was the force difficult to measure, but possible to affect, and as you can see very crucial. This was the community already gathered over many years, interested in Soulash, wanting to see it succeed, engaging friends and other potential players. This is the force that pushes me toward making this game amazing, and for that support, I will be forever grateful.

Summary

The final result was that we didn't make it to our goal, and all we raised during the campaign was lost. Despite the Kickstarter format, we did manage to get the following things for our effort:

• About 1000$ worth of sold copies on Itch.io for the ASCII alpha.
• About 60$ monthly on Patreon, where we continue to offer to include player-designed content into the core game.
• 120 followers on Twitter Soulash account (and about an extra 20 on mine).
• 1646 wishlists on Steam.
• about 80 more people on our Discord channel.
• A lot of valuable experience that will help with the Steam release.

I wouldn't call that "nothing", but an important step forward despite the loss. In the following article, I'm going more in-depth about what I've learned, what I think worked and what didn't on different platforms, and how I will prepare next time. You can access it now by supporting my work on Patreon with just 3$, or come back next weekend when it will be available to everyone for free.

Artur